A Journal of the American West—Lavishly Illustrated

Editorial: Occupy Wall Street/Gathering Hope

It’s nearing the end of day 48 of Occupy Wall Street. Yesterday (remarkably to me) 10,000 Occupy Oaklanders managed to bring the Port of Oakland to a standstill. Although there have been clashes and arrests there, as well as in other locales around the nation and the globe, overall this massive public demonstration has proved peaceful. It’s obvious that at its core this a nonviolent movement of passive civic resistance and, if necessary, disobedience.

At first the condescending voices of the self-appointed pundits and prophets, those “grown-up” plutocrats, tried in order to: dismiss, brush off, smirk at, marginalize, and demonize these “99%ers” as they have come to be called. (In our little town a letter writer to the local paper fell back on that old 50s’ saw—socialist/marxist/communist. Good grief.) Now the “wise men” are demanding “a plan” and, in the absence of a piece of paper (what no PowerPoint?), expect this (currently) loose cloth of fellow citizens to unravel in short order.

I would suggest the opposite: that the fabric of resistance is growing stronger, the stitches knitting together closer and closer. As we watch the debacle which calls itself our Congress continue to do nothing to ease national and international economic distress, it seems logical that more, rather than fewer, Americans will demand action. We will expect a new civic engagement toward positive action.

In 1995, at the beginning of the Gingrich congressional era, Gathering Hope, summing up nearly two years of citizen dialog about the state of the nation and the power of envisioning the future, stated the following:

America is entering an extraordinary time of uncertainty and challenge. Our democratic institutions are failing in multiple ways to ensure our own security, our children’s future, and the future of the planet itself.

Understanding the role of power is essential to understanding our current situation. Large, complex, interlocking institutions of power (including corporations, international financial systems, and government) operate within a dehumanizing value system summed up as “modern market individualism” that is inimical to economic and environmental justice.

A just and sustainable economy in balance with earth ecosystems demands transformation of all institutions toward a responsible democracy. A reformed, legitimized government must restore trust and pursue energetically its role as protector of the commons, guarantor of justice, and trustee for the future.

The path to a sustainable future requires a renewed citizenship of responsibility. Intense individualism must give way to care for the commonweal, for the future. We must envision a new social compact which affirms the claims of community and posterity on all our actions.

To this might be added today:

Unless we do, the future—our children’s future—will trail into narrowing corridors of no return.

Here are the closing words of Gathering Hope. Perhaps it will serve as one of many jumping off points for the movement to come. Ann

This Citizens Call ends where it began, with a reaffirmation of a civic democracy in which we as citizens proclaim a rendezvous with a new destiny, that of a just and sustainable future. We further affirm our confidence in the power of citizen deliberation, in the need to question power and the necessity of searching for truth in public life. In these affirmations, we accept the challenge of a participatory citizenship that demands that the boundaries of the possible widen, so that we today can say to the future that we have done all we could do.

One Response

The “wise men” always demand a plan, when confronted with the following simple truth from the people: The Emperor Has No Clothes.

Scholars note that the phrase “emperor’s new clothes” describes a common situation where “weavers” of official policy insist that the value of their labor be recognized apart from the physical reality of the moment, and has become a standard metaphor for anything that smacks of pretentiousness, pomposity, social hypocrisy, collective denial, or hollow ostentatiousness.

While today’s existing global power structure continues to try to conduct business as usual and insist that the economy is in good standing, there is no question that existing systems are unsustainable. The economic value of all of our assets and resources are at stake, and dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than their root causes, while delaying the consequences and numbing the public to their real effects, only exacerbates the inevitable results.

The bottom line – Financial distress continues to be increasingly widespread throughout the U.S. and the world. Arson, riots and looting are on the increase in Europe and public and private credit spirals into ever-riskier realms. The debt crisis is more advanced in Europe than it is in the U.S. Can Europe be anything but a precursor for the United States in this case? Remember,Greece had its first credit downgrade in December of 2009.

In sustainable development parlance, the “profit” leg of the triple-bottom-line appears more and more dubious with every passing day. Sustainable economic growth – an ever-increasingly fleeting concept in today’s world – is one of the vital legs of sustainable development. So in the absence of it, is sustainable development dead?

Absolutely not.

SLDI has identified why this should all have been expected (but wasn’t), and how shifting investments from Wall St. and banking-based assets to the only investments which mitigate the increasing risk of systemic failure of the economy brought on by excessive debt – sustainable global infrastructure – is the best course of action from here. Only by investing in nature-based assets with lasting inherent value such as land, shelter, food, water quality, and other ecosystem restoration services will we mitigate the increasing systemic economic risk and achieve the short- and long-term wealth gains we all strive to achieve.